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Owing to China’s information blockade, the Bo Xilai debacle has
made media of different countries play some “guessing games”.
Xinhua’s April 10 announcement pertaining to Bo’s alleged
involvement in the death of Neil Heywood momentarily brought all
these to a halt.

Already in mid-March the Communist regime made preparations to
accuse Bo of three crimes, yet the one related to “path struggle”
raised by Wen Jiabao during a March 14 press conference was not used
in the Xinhua announcement.

Self-immolation tragedies have
continually taken place among Tibetan monks in recent months. On
March 23, People’s Daily Online blamed the Dalai Lama for inciting
Tibetan monks to self-immolate and accused him of spreading Nazism to
the Tibetan people.

If the relationship between the Hong Kong Special Administrative
Region and Beijing were to be presented in a graph, an image bearing
little resemblance to Taiwan, Tibet and Xinjiang would emerge. While
Taiwan's relations with Beijing changes from being a pair of parallel
lines without intersection to two strings that have become entwined,
an “intimacy” that the island feels happy about for now; Tibet
and Xinjiang are originally “integral parts” of China where the
dwindling authority of the central government has to be maintained
with forcible measures; as for Hong Kong, the city has become
politically and economically inseparable from mainland China, the
people's grievances can be heard everywhere, and the sense of
alienation is strengthening by the day.

The perfect hotbed for rumors to thrive would be where the
politics is opaque and where power functions in a way that is
concealed from the public. China has always been full of rumors,
in particular when it is the time of chaos and confusion, or when a
dynasty nears its end. At present, the Chinese people in a time of
Web2.0 is surrounded by all sorts of rumors, as was the case when the
Qing dynasty was about to end a hundred years ago.